Anit-Virus help for all of us??????

Tue Nov 25 13:53:51 UTC 2003

Daniel Karrenberg wrote:
> I recommend that at home to all local primary schools.  They often do
> not have the latest hardware but some of them even run it on the
> latest hardware now.  This and frequent reloads of standard clean
> disk images tends to keep things clean and operational.  The image
> loads from a *nix server are routinely done by 10-year-olds.
Drivers are getting harder and harder to find for Win9x - even stuff that
was supported last year, seem to have "lost" the drivers from the manu
sites "we don't support Win9x anymore" *sigh*

> Unfortunately this is not a  really long term strategy.
> I expect apps that are essential to the schools but do
> not run on W98SE in the not-too-distant future.
I would be surprised. The upgrade treadmill is mostly there as a
money-tree for the manus - provided you haved xxx licences for office 9x,
xxx licences for Windows 9x and supported hardware, you could probably go
on indefinitely. (Who can name a feature they use more than once a month
in Word or Excel post-97 that wasn't in 97? and most of those seem to have
been third-party available plugins that M$ have built into later versions)
My biggest problem with 9x boxen (and we support 400 here) is printer
drivers; printers wear out faster than anything else in an office
environment, and the latest and greatest don't come with 9x drivers any
more (but often generic or older drivers still work - I don't think this
will always be true though)

School apps are a world of their own anyhow - writers will target the
platforms available as that's where the sales are, not the platforms M$'s
games division writes for. In the 486 days you could *still* buy new
software for the BBC micro in the UK - simply because so many schools
still had them.

Expansion of your machine pool would be a nightmare though - you can't buy
versions of office or windows behind the leading edge any more, and
regardless more and more seem to require "activiation" by being on the web
(not a good idea for an unpatched win9x box running unpatched office
suites, but then, isn't everyone on the web now?)

perhaps a migration to linux is in order? after all, its free(ish),
doesn't care too much about marketing deadlines, and if you start them
young enough, KDE or Gnome is certainly is no harder to learn than
windows.